We've now cataloged thousands of planets that orbit distant stars. For most of them, our knowledge is limited to basic statistics: their size, mass, and orbital distance from their host star. And, due ...

It was just over 20 years ago—a blink of a cosmic eye—that astronomers found the first planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. All these new worlds were gas-shrouded giants like Jupiter or Saturn ...

The nearest neighbor problem asks where a new point fits into an existing data set. A few researchers set out to prove that there was no universal way to solve it. Instead, they found such a way. If ...